ALLENTOWN, Pa. - On most school days, the 15 robots are inside Don Stahl's first-floor computer classroom in Allentown's Harrison Morton Middle School, having their batteries charged in a specially designed cabinet, or they're parked on the floor awaiting computer commands from students.

But today, because a few visitors are expected, the robots are lined up outside in the hallway, as if they're serving some sort of classroom exile.

Stahl, who runs the school's computer lab and teaches courses that use advanced technology, didn't want a traffic jam at the classroom doorway as the robots' drivers, mostly 7th- and 8th-grade students, maneuvered the remote controlled robots out of the classroom, where floor space is already at a premium, even without a few visitors added to the mix.

For the past several weeks, the students in Stahl's 10:30 a.m. class have been learning the basics of robotic control, as they use computers, a wireless Internet connection and software to move the robots around the school's first-floor hallway.

As they drive them, they can "see" what's in front of the robot, thanks to the mounted Web camera. The camera sends an image back to the student's desktop computer. There is a slight delay, but the students get a sense of where their robot is in the school's rectangular first-floor hallway corridor and, more importantly, what else is in the path of their particular robot.

"These students have never really driven anything before," Stahl notes. Stahl and his teaching assistant, Jesse Wolfgang, a Lehigh University graduate student, have already driven home the point that this isn't a video game, that the robots can't go through walls and that there are consequences when the robots hit something.

Eventually, the students will write a simple computer program, using the software that allows the students to drive the robots. The program will move the robots around the hallway, making all the correct turns without any help from the student operators. By doing so, using the "if-then" construct basic to all types of programming language, the students will learn computer programming in a way that is fun, says William Pottenger, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University.

Pottenger is helping the middle school with a National Science Foundation seed grant, which aims to encourage minority students and women to study science and math. The program is called STEM, or Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

While the term robot suggests a humanoid creature with arms and eyes and a chip-driven personality, the computers the students use at the school are more prosaic creatures.

They look more like a laptop with wheels with an eye-like Web camera mounted on a spike, which suspends the camera above the rolling unit. The camera sends a black-and-white image of the path the robot is approaching to the driver's desktop computer, over the school's wireless Internet grid.

At this point, the robots mainly whirl noiselessly around the hallway. Eventually, they will measure distances and, by next year, move around a simulated Martian landscape the school is building in its unused bomb shelter basement. Students from other schools also will be able to use the landscape and robots for science, art and English projects, says Pottenger.